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 WRITERS AND THEIR WORK

I SOBEL A RMSTRONG
General Editor

REVENGE TRAGEDIES
OF
THE RENAISSANCE
 Title page, The Spanish Tragedy (1615).
Reproduced with the permission of the British Library.
REVENGE TRAGEDIES
OF
THE RENAISSANCE
Janet Clare
 In memory of Barbara Peters
and Inga-Stina Ewbank

# Copyright 2007 by Janet Clare

First published in 2007 by Northcote House Publishers Ltd, Horndon, Tavistock,
Devon, PL19 9NQ, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (0) 1822 810066 Fax: +44 (0) 1822 810034.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an
information retrieval system (other than short extracts for the purposes of review)
without the express permission of the Publishers given in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-7463-1085-4 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-7463-0918-6 paperback
Typeset by PDQ Typesetting, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
 Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements viii

Biographical and Historical Outline ix

References and Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: Revenge and Revenge Tragedy 1

1 Revenge and Justice: Elizabethan Revenge

Tragedies 18

2 Revenge and Metatheatricality: Antonio's Revenge,

The Revenger's Tragedy 55

3 Theatre of God's Judgement: The Atheist's Tragedy,

The Changeling 76

4 Revenge out of Italy: The White Devil, The Duchess of

Malfi, Women Beware Women, `Tis Pity She's a Whore 92

5 The Woman's Part: The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois,

The Maid's Tragedy 115

Notes 134

Select Bibliography 140

Index 147
 Illustrations

Frontispiece: title page, The Spanish Tragedy (1615).

Reproduced with the permission of the British Library.

1 Peter Needham as Revenge and Michael Bryant

as Hieronimo in the 1982 Royal National Theatre
production of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, directed
by Michael Bogdanov. With the permission of
the photographer Laurence Burns. 27
2 Daniel Thorndike as Balzuto and Michael Bryant
as Hieronimo and in the 1982 Royal National
Theatre production of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy,
directed by Michael Bogdanov. With the permission
of the photographer Laurence Burns. 33
3 David Burke as the Ghost in the 1989 Royal
National Theatre production of Hamlet, directed
by Richard Eyre. With the permission of the
photographer John Haynes. 41
4 John Castle as Claudius and Sylvia Sims as Gertrude
in the 1989 Royal National Theatre production of
Hamlet, directed by Richard Eyre. With the
permission of the photographer John Haynes. 46
5 John Castle as Claudius and Daniel Day-Lewis as
Hamlet in the 1989 Royal National Theatre
production of Hamlet, directed by Richard Eyre.
With the permission of the photographer John
Haynes. 48

vi
 ILLUSTRATIONS

6 Antony Sher as Vindici and Stella Gonet as Castiza

in the 1987 Royal Shakespeare production of
The Revenger's Tragedy, directed by Di Trevis.
Joe Cocks Studio Collection # Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust. 67
7 Antony Sher as Vindici in the 1987 Royal
Shakespeare Company production of The
Revenger's Tragedy, directed by Di Trevis.
Joe Cocks Studio Collection # Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust. 68
8 David Waller as the Duke and Ian Richardson as
Vindici in the 1966 Royal Shakespeare Company
production of The Revenger's Tragedy, directed by
Trevor Nunn. Photographer Reg Wilson # Royal
Shakespeare Company. 71
9 Miranda Richardson as Beatrice and George Harris
as De Flores in the 1988 Royal National
Theatre production of The Changeling, directed
by Richard Eyre. With the permission of the
photographer John Haynes. 89
10 Dennis Quilley as Brachiano in the 1991 Royal
National Theatre production of The White Devil.
With the permission of the photographer
Ivan Kyncl. 100
11 SineÂad Cusack as Evadne and John Carlisle as the
King in the 1980 Royal Shakespeare Theatre
production of The Maid's Tragedy, directed by
Barry Kyle. Joe Cocks Studio Collection #
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 131

vii
 Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to colleagues and friends who read sections of

this book and were generous with their time and comments: Anne
Fogarty, Frank McGuinness, Peter Culhane and, especially,
Raymond Hargreaves. As always, I am indebted to John Gallagher
for all his support and to the late Douglas Jefferson, who
discussed some revenge plays with me in the book's early stages.
Students in my `Hamlet and Renaissance Revenge Tragedies'
seminar at University College Dublin, particularly William Moore,
Mary Boland, Kevin Power and Aoife Mahon, provided an
invaluable forum for the development of some of the ideas in
this book.
I would like to acknowledge the help I have had from Gavin
Clarke of the Royal National Theatre Archive, from Susan Brock
and Helen Hargest of the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-
Avon, and from Janet Birkett of the Theatre Museum, Covent
Garden. I am grateful to the Shakespeare Trust 's Jubilee
Education Fund for a generous grant towards the reproduction
of photographs.
This book is dedicated to the memory of two wonderful
teachers and academics. I first read and saw several of the plays
discussed in this book while at school. Without the intellectual
stimulation and academic encouragement of Barbara Peters it
could not have been written. The lectures and work of Inga-Stina
Ewbank as a scholar of Renaissance drama, and latterly her
friendship, have been a source of continued inspiration.

viii
 Biographical and
Historical Outline

The date of the first performance of many Renaissance plays can

only be approximate. The year given is the earliest possible date as
recorded in Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English
Drama 975±1700, third edition, revised by Sylvia Stoler Wagon-
heim (London, 1989).

DRAMATISTS

Thomas Kyd born 1558, died 1594

Henry Chettle born c.1560, died 1607
George Chapman born c.1560, died 1634
William Shakespeare born 1564, died 1616
Thomas Middleton born 1570, died 1627
Thomas Heywood born c.1570, died 1641
John Marston born 1576, died 1634
John Fletcher born 1579, died 1625
John Webster born c.1580, died 1634
Francis Beaumont born c.1584, died 1616
John Ford born 1586, died post-1640

CHRONOLOGY

1562 Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc (Christ-

mas revels at the Inner Temple).
1567 Construction of the first purpose-built theatre, the Red
Lion, in Stepney, London.
Translation by Arthur Golding of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

ix
 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL OUTLINE

1561 Birth of Francis Bacon.

1569 Suppression of the Corpus Christi plays in York.
1576 Construction of the Theatre by James Burbage.
1581 Centralized system of theatrical censorship enforced
under the Master of the Revels.
Publication by Thomas Newton of Seneca his Tenne
Tragedies.
1587 Construction of the Rose playhouse on the Bankside.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (performed in 1592 by
Strange's Men). Play revised 1601±2.
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
1588 The Spanish Armada.
Thomas Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur (Gray's Inn at
Court).
1589 A lost play of Hamlet, possibly by Thomas Kyd.
1589±92 William Shakespeare, probably with Pembroke's Men,
composes his first plays.
1592±94 Re-grouping of theatrical companies; formation of Lord
Chamberlain's Men (Shakespeare's Company) and the
Admiral's Men (their chief rivals). Plays performed at the
Theatre and the Rose.
1593 Death of Christopher Marlowe.
1594 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (?Pembroke's Men).
1597 Publication of Bacon's Essays, including `Of Revenge'.
1599 Opening of the Globe.
Revival of companies of boy actors.
Certain verse satires, including work of John Marston,
ordered to be publicly burnt.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Chamberlain's Men).
1600 John Marston, Antonio's Revenge (Children at Paul's).
Shakespeare, Hamlet (Chamberlain's Men).
1601 Essex's rebellion. Execution of the Earl of Essex for
treason.
1602 John Webster begins to write for the stage.
Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge for a
Father (Admiral's Men).
1603 Death of Queen Elizabeth. Accession of James I.
Lord Chamberlain's Men become the King's Men.
Publication of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's
Essays.

x
 BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL OUTLINE

1604 Patent granted to the company at the indoor theatre at

Blackfriars: the Children of the Queen's Revels.
Thomas Middleton begins to write satirical comedies of
London life for the Children at Paul's.
1605 Gunpowder plot.
Inigo Jones begins designing court masques.
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (King's Men).
1607 Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece (Queen Anne's).
1610 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy
(King's Men).
George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (Chil-
dren of Whitefriars).
1611 Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy or The Honest Man's
Revenge (?King's Men).
1612 John Webster, The White Devil (Queen Anne's).
1614 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (King's Men).
1615 John Ford, `Tis Pity She's a Whore (later performed by
Queen Henrietta's Men).
1620 Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (? King's Men).
1622 Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
(Lady Elizabeth's Men).
1625 Death of James I; accession of Charles I.

xi
 References and Abbreviations

I have quoted Shakespeare from the most recent Arden editions of

the plays: Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, 1995);
Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London, 1982).
Quotations from The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, The
Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois are from Four
Revenge Tragedies, ed. Katherine Eisaman Maus (Oxford, 1995).
Other citations are from the following editions of the plays:
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy, ed. T. W.
Craik, Revels Plays (Manchester, 1988)
Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. Harold Jenkins (Oxford,
1951)
John Ford, `Tis Pity She's a Whore, ed. Derek Roper, Revels Plays
(London, 1975)
John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, ed. Reavley Gair, Revels Plays
(Manchester, 1978)
Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. J. R. Mulryne, Revels
Plays (London, 1975)
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. N. W.
Bawcutt, Revels Plays (London, 1958; reprinted with additions, 1961)
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc in Two Tudor
Tragedies, ed. William Tydeman (London, 1992)
Seneca, Thyestes in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling
(Harmondsworth, 1966)
John Webster, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown, Revels Plays
(London, 1966)
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, Revels
Plays (London, 1964)
Biblical references are from the King James Bible (1611).
Abbreviations used in the notes:
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
SEL Studies in English Literature

xii
 Introduction:
Revenge and Revenge Tragedy

Revenge, as the infliction of harm in righteous response to

perceived injury or injustice, is a universal practice, transcultural
and pan-historical. As is most often the case in tragedy, the
enactment of revenge can be a personal desire, a sacred duty
that falls upon a member of a family or clan; or it can be part of
the collective consciousness of a victimized people. From duels
to punishment beatings, the impulse to revenge is a primitive
drive to retribution: A kills B and must be made to pay with his
life by someone who identifies with B. Retributive justice is seen
as effecting closure and restoring balance. Its starkest articula-
tion within the Judeao-Christian tradition is to be found in
Exodus: ‘And if any mischief follow then thou shalt give life for
life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe’
(Exodus 21:23–5). In the shockingly spectacular theatre of
Renaissance revenge tragedy we find the literal enactment of
such forms of retaliation; an original act of bodily mutilation is
replicated in a reprisal which matches or, more often, exceeds
the offence.
Indeed, acts of revenge tend to be more cruel and insatiable
than other acts of aggression. The very vocabulary of revenge, its
constitutive metaphors, gives expression to this extreme
punitive quality, as in the term ‘thirst for revenge’, and both
the verbal and the visual imagery of revenge tragedies convey
this compelling sense of thirst and appetite: ‘Now could I drink
hot blood,/ And do such bitter business as the day/ Would quake
to look at’ (III. ii. 351–3) declares Hamlet, sure now of the king’s
guilt, for once assuming the posture of a conventional avenger.
There is a kind of grotesque appropriateness in equating

1
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

revenge with feasting, in terms of the metaphors and cognates

of satiation. In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare borrows from the
description in Seneca’s Thyestes of Atreus’s revenge on his
brother Thyestes in depicting the repayment of atrocity as
culminating in the spectacularly brutal form of the cannibalistic
feast. A similar literal working of the vengeful appetite is
represented in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge when Antonio
determines that his antagonist Piero will ‘feed on life’, in this
case Piero’s innocent son Julio. Antonio goes only so far as to
present Piero with a dish containing his son’s limbs, but his
barely submerged desire to close vengeance with a cannibalistic
banquet is clear. In Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo
imagines a fate for his son’s murderers which stops just short of
devouring them: he will, he declares, appeal to Proserpine in the
underworld that she ‘may grant/ Revenge on them that
murdered my son/ Then will I rend and tear them thus and
thus,/ Shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth’ (III. xiii.
120–3). In Titus Andronicus and Antonio’s Revenge the respective
appetites of the revenger and of the offender ironically coalesce:
the metaphorical appetite of revenge is satisfied by the spectacle
or anticipation of the enemy’s physical satiation.
Seen from a social and moral perspective, such real or
imaginatively projected acts, evoking excesses of cruelty, would
be judged grotesque and deplorable and revenge the unleashing
of a base and dangerous emotion. Certainly, revenge is commonly
regarded as a barbaric practice because of its violent extremes
which frequently exceed an ‘eye for an eye’, perpetuating
indiscriminate and often gratuitous killing. Yet, the response
evoked by some revenge tragedies is more ambivalent as we
witness or hear of an injury – often cold-blooded murder – that is
itself base and dangerous and causes the protagonist to
experience gross injustice and an unbearable sense of loss. From
the perspective of a suffering individual, revenge can be
representative of a morally considered desire to keep faith with
the dead and a ritual of closure that brings liberation for the
protagonist. But it can extend beyond this, in that revenge may be
represented as conceivably the only way of restoring order in a
society where the political and moral framework has been
violated. The original offence is so great that nothing less than
extreme, counterbalancing wounds can be inflicted.

2
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

The ambivalence of feeling aroused by the misery of the

wronged individual or individuals, on the one hand, and the
wreckage of revenge on the other, has made revenge a
compelling dramatic form. Moreover, the extremity of the
emotions released in such acts, as well as the spectacular closure
they induce, has made revenge a recurrent subject of national
drama. From the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides, whose myths were adapted, stripped of some of their
dignity, by the Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca,
through to revenge and honour in Golden Age Spanish drama
of Lope de Vega and Calderón and their contemporaries of the
English Renaissance, revenge is a dramatic form with an
extensive cultural history. Dramatists have understood how
grief turns to anger so that the desire to revenge becomes a
violent obsession and, equally, the visceral fascination this
creates as theatre. Loss and rage distort the psyche of the
revenger and a determination is forged that retaliation should
exceed the original offence. In The Spanish Tragedy, generally
regarded as the first revenge play of the Elizabethan commer-
cial, popular theatres, Hieronimo resolves to revenge the
murder of his son Horatio by Lorenzo, the nephew of the King
of Spain; but he also vows that the killing will not stop with
Lorenzo. He declares that he will ‘marshal up the fiends in hell/
To be revenged on you all for this’ (III. xii. 77–8). ‘You all’, in the
play’s catastrophe, includes the prince’s innocent father, the
Duke of Castile, so that in the final reckoning the Spanish line of
succession is wiped out. In feuds – real or fictional – vengeance
breeds vengeance; violence escalates and all parties are
consumed in a domino effect of hatred and retaliation.
The prime motivation for such atrocious acts is the emotion of
anger which moral philosophers such as Plato, Seneca and
Cicero, widely read in the Renaissance, had argued was better
to be eradicated altogether while recognizing its deep-rooted
nature. Concluding his essay on anger, Montaigne quotes
Aristotle’s observation that choler can serve ‘virtue and valour
as a weapon’; but, adds Montaigne, ‘it must be some new-
fangled weapon; for we wield the other weapons: that one
wields us; it is not our hand that guides it: it guides our hand; it
gets a hold on us: not we on it.’1 Seneca, in three moral essays
describing anger as the most terrible and frenzied of all the

3
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

emotions, advocated the Stoic remedy of restraint.2 Seneca’s

plays of revenge – rhetorical dramas of declaration, not
performance – show the ghastly effects of anger. Figures such
as Hecuba, Medea, Atreus and Hercules are overwhelmed by it
and subsequently enact the most hideous forms of vengeance.
Thyestes murders his brother’s children; Medea murders her
own children in revenge against her adulterous husband Jason;
and Phaedre plots the destruction of her stepson Hippolytus
when he is unresponsive to her desires. The emotional
dynamics of revenge cause the abandonment of restraint and
can produce psychic disorder. In plays of the Renaissance we
witness protagonists like Titus in Titus Andronicus and Hieronimo
in The Spanish Tragedy metamorphosed by anger, devising and
performing atrocities. Anger feeds on anger and in both these
figures leads to moments of mental breakdown and insanity.
In his often-quoted essay ‘On Revenge’, Francis Bacon
differentiated between public revenge, an example of which
he gave as the death of Caesar and which is ‘for the most part
fortunate’, and private revengers deemed mischievous, vindic-
tive and unfortunate.3 The suggestion is that if the pursuit of
revenge is open and declared, rather than covert, the offence
may be mitigated. It was the plotting of private revenge, often in
the secluded setting of the court, which preoccupied Kyd,
Shakespeare, Marston and Webster. Playwrights, however,
invest revenge with varied moral shading according to the
nature of the private revenger. On the one hand, we have
revengers who act, as they see it, to bring justice and restore
balance; on the other, there are characters who declare revenge
and act in ways that are destructively self-advancing. Extreme
figures of hatred like Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy, Iago in
Othello and Aaron in Titus Andronicus appropriate or usurp
revenge as their motive while Titus, Hieronimo and Hamlet
associate revenge with justice and duty. Somewhere in between
are figures like Vindici in The Revenger’s Tragedy and Bosola in
The Duchess of Malfi.
As is clear from its usage in non-dramatic texts of the period,
revenge was not exclusively imbricated with issues of justice, but
also stemmed from less elevated instincts. John Norden, in The
Mirror of Honour, for example, commenting on the essential
qualities of the military commander, warns against envy, ‘for it

4
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

feedeth only upon the damnable desires of doing injury in the

best’ and a marginal note is added, ‘Envy will find matter to
bear colour of lawful revenge’.4 In juxtaposing ‘lawful’ and
‘revenge’, it is accepted that revenge may in some circumstances
be justified, while the point remains that, in Norden’s observa-
tion, revenge is used falsely to represent acts dictated by sinister
motives. There are illustrations of this appropriation in the plays
discussed in this book, as we see characters, identified in
Freudian terms as all id and ego, and bent on nothing but self-
advancement, employing the term revenge simply to remove
those who obstruct their desires.
If the revenger is far from a type character, what distinguishes
one forced by circumstance to plot in secret for some kind of just
reprisal from a villain who may deploy the term revenge as a
rationale for deadly intrigue? One possible distinction is that
with the latter there is an opacity of motive. Further, the
spurious revenger continues to shroud his action in secrecy once
the deed is done, while the revenger obsessed with obtaining
some kind of justice lays claim to his act. Lorenzo in The Spanish
Tragedy, after the murder of Horatio further conspires to cover
his tracks and wants his part to remain forever unknown. Iago’s
last contemptuous words are ‘Demand me nothing. What you
know, you know./ From this time forth I never will speak word.’
On the other hand, at the close of The Revenger’s Tragedy Vindici
proudly and – consistent with the play’s tone – gleefully
acknowledges himself and his brother as the duke’s murderers:
‘We may be bold/ To speak it now. ’Twas somewhat witty
carried,/ Though we say it; ’twas we two murdered him’ (V. iii.
95–7). The admission leads to his own execution. Hamlet’s dying
words are a request to his friend Horatio to report his ‘cause
aright’ and ‘tell his story’. For the protagonist of revenge plays
the act of revenge is one of closure, figuratively and literally as,
in his public identification with his deed, reparation is made for
the past and is sealed with his own death, while the malicious
schemer dies taking his secrets to the grave.
For the moralist such distinctions in the twisted or in the
psychologically complex motivations of revenge are largely
irrelevant. In Bacon’s view society cannot function if individuals
are allowed to seek redress on their own: ‘The more man’s
nature runs to [revenge], the more ought law to weed it out.’ A

5
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

system of justice can be seen as a human best endeavour to

provide an objective and impartial means of redressing wrongs.
A criminal justice system imposing formal punishment also
externalizes grief and offers the would-be avenger satisfaction.
Yet what happens when the offender is the sovereign or head of
state as, for example, in Hamlet, Antonio’s Revenge, The Maid’s
Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy, or when justice is unobtain-
able, as in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus? Bacon
acknowledges that ‘the most tolerable sort of revenge is for those
wrongs for which there is no remedy’, but with the caveat ‘Let a
man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish;
else a man’s enemy is still beforehand, and it is two for one.’ The
corrupt state where wrongs cannot be remedied is a recurring
location for Renaissance plays as well as a metaphor, as in
Hamlet, for a more endemic human corruption. Where there is
no legal redress, an unwritten code is invoked. Revenge does
not necessarily put the law out of office, as Bacon affirms it does,
because in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge and
The Duchess of Malfi the law is seen to have no office in the first
place. Then the code of revenge becomes the closest approxima-
tion to law: a rough justice, or, as Bacon declared, a ‘wild justice’,
on the brink of anarchy.
There is no evidence in English Renaissance culture that
revenge was or could ever be officially condoned.5 For the
legislator revenge was repugnant to the natural law, while for
the moralist it was considered barbaric. In 1612 a Scottish noble
Lord Sanquire was brought to trial for taking vengeance on a
man who several years earlier had blinded him in one eye in a
fencing match.6 Francis Bacon, as Solicitor General, equated the
crime with vengeance: ‘Your temptation was revenge, which the
more natural it is to man, the more have laws, both divine and
human, sought to repress it.’ Bacon couples social and religious
prohibition. Yet biblical teaching was tangled and sometimes
paradoxical. On the one hand, as has been noted, the vengeful
god of Exodus, almost adumbrating the retributive bodily
mutilations of Renaissance tragedy, advocates ‘eye for eye,
tooth for tooth’. Again, in Numbers God tells Moses, ‘The
revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he
meeteth him, he shall slay him’ (35:19). In Psalms there is
exultation in revenge: ‘The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth

6
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked’
(58:10). But this approval of violent retribution is superseded by
the teaching of the New Testament where the would-be
revenger finds little support for his actions. St Paul in his letter
to the Ephesians exhorts ‘Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the
sun go down upon your wrath’ (4:26). Paul makes it explicit that
vengeance usurps divine prerogative: ‘Recompense to no man
evil for evil’ (Romans, 12:17) and adds the much cited clause,
‘Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is
written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’
(Romans, 12:19). The avenger might, however, see a loophole
here; just as Hamlet reflects on himself as God’s ‘scourge and
minister’ (III. iv. 176), the revenger might fashion himself as an
agent of divine justice or chastisement. But, overall, armed with
New Testament scripture, the theologian could only condemn
revenge, and the revenger has to quote selectively to find any
biblical sanction for his actions.
We cannot, though, innocently adopt dominant Elizabethan
ideologies against revenge as the context for reading revenge
tragedy. As an aesthetic domain, theatre is not bound to
replicate its culture’s orthodoxy. The instincts and dilemmas
which inhere in revenge, resisted in Bacon’s essay, make for
powerful theatre as the dramatist explores what the law-giver
forbids as an individual enterprise. In plays of revenge the
revenger is humanized, his predicament individualized and,
through the theatrical convention of the soliloquy, the audience
has access to the recesses of his mind. Moreover, by showing the
avenger’s inner self in conflict with the corrupt political world
he inhabits, the playwright can problematize the official
morality of revenge. There is a touch of the rebel or
revolutionary in several avengers in Renaissance theatre, as
they rise up against a state of the world they find intolerable.
Certainly, in drama stretching over several decades from the
1580s onwards, questions are raised which are largely absent in
anti-revenge advocacy. How does a protagonist respond to a
situation where revenge must be taken against a tyrant ruler,
even though it remains treason and means almost certain death
for the avenger? What happens when revenge is expected of an
individual not necessarily predisposed to act in such a way, as in
Hamlet? What happens psychologically to the individual in the

7
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

process of becoming a revenger? Bacon does indeed hint at a

response when he claims at the end of his essay that ‘vindictive
people live the life of witches’; but only the drama can represent
the terrible pressures on the mind created by the obligation to
revenge. Within the often extravagant and discursive plotting of
the revenge plays of the Renaissance such issues are embedded.
While these tragedies of revenge engage the audience at
moral, psychological, emotional and political levels, arguably
their most immediate impact lies in the ritualistic and
spectacular quality they possess. The staging of the rituals of
revenge is often visually impressive in symbolism and tableaux.
In Hoffman, Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenger’s Tragedy and ’Tis Pity
She’s a Whore, characters variously gather together to swear and
then enact vengeance. Revenge tragedy is a theatre of cruelty
and a theatre of blood, so much so that a play like Titus
Andronicus with its human sacrifice, rape and mutilation and
final act of cannibalism was judged so hideous that throughout
the eighteenth century it was thought not to be Shakespeare’s
work.7 But the play is of its kind. Whatever their exploration of
ethical and political issues, revenge tragedies are visceral in
their displays of horror and violence. Unlike the extreme acts of
classical tragedy, Renaissance playwrights did not report the
atrocity, but represented it on the stage. Audiences brought to
the theatre not only prior theatrical experiences of revenge but
other cultural and social associations. The ritualized ‘justice’ of
the private avenger could be said to correspond to the theatre of
punishment orchestrated by the state, which was witnessed by
theatre audiences in the public execution. Revenge tragedies
invert the process of state punishment and depict the subject
acting violently against autocracy. In Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of
Hoffman, for example, the opening stage direction reads strikes
open a curtain where appears a body. This is the corpse of Hoffman’s
father, executed by order of the state as a pirate and condemned
to die by being crowned with a scorching hot crown. Hoffman
addresses the corpse, ‘the dead remembrance of my living
father’, and vows revenge. In the next scene he is represented as
torturing to death with a searing crown his first victim, Prince
Otho, thus replicating his father’s death. The play closes with
Hoffman about to meet the same fate as his father and Otho at
the order of the Duke of Saxony. Here state revenge or

8
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

punishment and private revenge or retaliation become mirror

images of each other.
State punishment, like private revenge, was the rite that
concluded the crime and exceeded the savagery of the crime
itself.8 The punishment of a traitor – the monarch’s revenge –
was the most horrendous of deaths: although a few were
granted late reprieve, alleged traitors were drawn to the
gallows, hung, disembowelled while still alive and then be-
headed; aristocratic traitors were merely beheaded. As a symbol
of the state’s power to root out treason, the head of the traitor
was displayed on Tower Bridge. The ‘private’ revenges of
Antonio, Titus and Vindici are no more horrendous in their
physical torment and in the triumphant acknowledgement of
their vengeful acts than the institutionalized revenge of the
scaffold. Public executions often bore the specific mark of the
crime: the tongues of blasphemers were pierced; the right hand
of a murderer was cut off. Such theatrical representation of the
crime was in turn reproduced in the public theatres as revengers
such as Hoffman, Hamlet, to a point, and Vindici imitate, in
their acts of crowning and poisoning, the original ‘offence’ and
employ a similar symbolism. In this sense, in the visual imagery
they deploy, the plays do indeed re-present their culture’s
orthodoxy.

REVENGE AND GENRE

The appeal of revenge to playwrights both technically and

aesthetically is obvious. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
(1967), Tom Stoppard’s inventive and metadramatic response to
Hamlet, the Player remarks to Guildenstern, ‘There’s a design at
work in all art – surely you know that? Events must play
themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.’9
Despite a certain flippancy, we can see how pertinent the
observation is to revenge, which may be considered the
dramatist’s ideal weapon of choice, providing, as it does, a
hand chain of cause and effect on which to play. As a catalyst for
action, and as dramatic resolution, revenge, bound up with
ideologies of tyranny and absolutism and with more domestic
concerns of rivalry, love and honour, is remarkably adaptable to

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 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

different kinds of drama. In time, the repetition of the theme

and of accompanying motifs was to lead to elements of parody
in plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy and Antonio’s Revenge or, as in
Hamlet, more subtle and distinctive explorations of the complex-
ities of revenge. This very resilience and flexibility of revenge as
cause and motivation are demonstrated in the way that for
decades, through to the mid seventeenth century, dramatists
returned to and reshaped stories of revenge.10
Revenge – or the pursuit of revenge – is not, of course,
exclusive to tragedy. In the Elizabethan history play, dynasties,
factions and clans strive to avenge atrocities committed against
them. Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays – the three
Henry VI plays and Richard III – is structured on an extensive
pattern of revenge as the Yorkists and Lancastrians kill in serial
retaliation. In Richard III the balance which revenge is seen to
effect is present in the play’s rhetorical patterning, notably in
the lines of the lamenting women. Queen Margaret in her
rebuke to the Duchess of York bitterly reflects on their
respective losses and the counterbalancing retribution: ‘Thy
Edward, he is dead, that killed my Edward:/ Thy other Edward
dead, to quit my Edward;/ . . .Thy Clarence, he is dead, that
stabbed my Edward’ (IV. iv. 63–7). Revenge forms part of the
epic scope of pre-Tudor history and as such it is represented less
in terms of individual responsibility and compulsion and more
in terms of historical necessity. This is less the case with
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a classical history play that is
structured on revenge. In deeming public revenge admissible,
Bacon had cited the example of the assassination of Julius
Caesar or rather the reprisal against the assassins. In Julius
Caesar, however, no such clear moral exemplum emerges as we
see the shaping of source material for theatrical purposes and its
redirection for different political ends. Shakespeare invests the
historical narrative with an element of the popular revenge play
as Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus predicting the victory of
Antony and Octavius over Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. The
dramatic narrative is altogether more morally complex than
Bacon’s passing remark would seem to allow as the assassin
Brutus considers that in murdering Caesar he is striking against
tyranny. Mark Antony and Octavius act decisively, but clearly
from mixed motives, to avenge the assassination. The play closes

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 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

not with a sense of retribution and appeasement for the murder

of Caesar, or the vindication of public revenge, but with a sense
of loss at the death of Brutus, recognized by his opponents as a
noble Roman. Interestingly, the dynamics of this historical
revenge play contrast with those of fictive, popular revenge
tragedy. In the latter, the audience often reaches some under-
standing of the loss and predicament of the avenger, whereas
revenge in the history play is seen as a weapon consciously
manipulated for political ascendancy.
As a universal response, revenge lends itself easily to comedy
where it provides a way of settling scores, by bringing
discomfiture and humiliation to the opponent, though not
physical injury.11 We can see this pattern in Marston’s The
Malcontent when the villain Mendoza is exposed and the
restored Duke orders him literally to be kicked out of Genoa.
In comedy, as so horrifically and spectacularly happens in
tragedy, one act of retaliation begets another. In Twelfth Night,
for example, a group of roisterers led by Sir Toby Belch take
revenge on the puritanical steward Malvolio for suppressing
their drunken revels by tricking him into believing that the
mistress of the household is in love with him. Malvolio’s
subsequent humiliation and torment lead to a darkening of
the mood of the comedy encapsulated in the threat to his
tormentors of further retaliation in his exit line: ‘I’ll be revenged
on the whole pack of you.’ By its very nature revenge adds
shades of darkness to comedy. One of the clearest illustrations
of this is The Merchant of Venice, the most intractable of
Shakespeare’s so-called romantic comedies. There is an inter-
esting fusion in this play of what in tragedy remains discrete;
that is, private revenge which is identified with the institutio-
nalized revenge of the law. In demanding a pound of Antonio’s
flesh as forfeiture for the merchant’s failure to repay the loan,
and in refusing Bassanio’s offer of its double repayment,
Shylock is clearly out for blood revenge. As Shylock ‘whets his
knife’ ready to slice Antonio’s flesh thereby causing his death,
and as Gratiano refers to the Jew’s ‘wolvish, bloody, starved, and
ravenous’ desires, we have the verbal and visual imagery of
revenge tragedy. The difference here, of course, is that this is
taking place in the civilized venue of the Venetian court
presided over by the Duke.

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 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

Shylock embodies the spirit of revenge and yet operates

within the parameters of the law and speaks the language of
public justice. When Bassanio asks him ‘Do all men kill the
things they do not love?’, Shylock’s reply is animated by hatred
for the Christian community (a hatred which can be understood
within the play) and by thoughts of revenge, ‘Hates any man the
thing he would not kill?’ Yet, as he reiterates, he stands for law,
and Portia, disguised as the lawyer, accepts that, despite the
strangeness of his case, the Venetian law cannot deny him. In
his pursuit of private revenge pursued in public, Shylock is
defeated not by Portia’s eloquent disquisition on mercy, but,
finally, by the law that is applied against him with the same
literalism with which he invoked it. He is within his rights to
demand a pound of Antonio’s flesh, but not to spill one drop of
Antonio’s blood. Recognizing his defeat, Shylock is prepared to
withdraw his demands and accept the money, but, here,
refracting the perpetuating tendencies of revenge, Shylock is
punished and humiliated by the court and the Christian
community as he is forced to surrender his wealth and religion
for threatening the life of a gentile. The Merchant of Venice just
keeps within the bounds of comedy, but, in its depiction of
revenge as colouring the relationship between Jew and
Christian, there is a disturbing anatomization of the malice,
envy and hatred that lie behind the supposed Venetian civility.
If genres other than tragedy employ motives and motifs of
revenge, it can also be said that a strain of black comedy is
intrinsic to revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedy is an unstable
genre shot through with elements of the grotesque and liable to
tilt into farce. Within the narrative structure of revenge plays
and the excesses of retaliation there is a darkly comic potential.
Taking the cue from Senecan avengers like Atreus, who declares
‘You cannot say you have avenged a crime/ Unless you better it’
(Thyestes, Act II, ll. 195–6), the retaliatory act outdoes the original
crime. But there is often something so melodramatic in this very
inordinate re-action that the audience, in some sense on the side
of the revenger, may be provoked into uneasy laughter at his
lavish, cruelly refined, but often aesthetically appropriate,
contrivances. Grotesque action threatens to topple over into
sickening farce, as in the cannibalistic feast in Titus Andronicus
and, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindici’s whetting of the Duke’s

12
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

sexual desires with the dressed-up skeletal frame of Vindici’s

sometime lover Gloriana, before the Duke dies by kissing the
poisoned skull. Laughter is a mechanism of release not only for
the audience, but also for the characters, burdened with the task
of revenge, who take refuge in hollow laughter. One of the
defining moments in Titus Andronicus is when Titus hears that
his sons, whom he thinks he has saved by lopping off his hand,
have been executed: he can only laugh; he cannot even begin to
grieve. Hamlet’s bitter, sardonic humour, his quips and self-
mockery may be seen as ways of articulating and rising above
the conflicting pressures bearing down on him.
In his comprehensive study of revenge tragedy John Kerrigan
has commented on the comic strain of the plays and
distinguishes between the comic interludes and surprises of
other tragedies, which criticism tends to integrate, and comic
components of revenge plays, which spring spontaneously from
tragic action. ‘Repeatedly’, concludes Kerrigan, ‘vengeance
generates from out of its dramaturgical potential a strain of
awkward comedy which raises laughter and kills it.’12 We could
take this further and say that writers of revenge plays are
conscious and highly manipulative of the comic strain which
inheres in their material. For example, as Evadne, the female
avenger of The Maid’s Tragedy, ties the king to the bed ready to
stab him to death, the king is made to exclaim to his lover, ‘What
pretty new device is this, Evadne?’ (V. i. 47). Nervous laughter is
thus released immediate to the heinous act of killing the king – a
deed from which male characters have shied away. The
enactment of revenge within a masque or play, as in The
Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and Women Beware Women,
could be seen as something of a stage cliché, but again the
aesthetic distancing associates revenge with ‘play’ and artifice, a
contrived act which entertains as much as it disturbs or shocks.
In such scenes there is considerable dramatic irony as we move
between two levels of action – the apparent and the actual – and
the semblance of the ‘play’ is revealed to a startled on-stage
audience to be the murderous ‘reality’.
Renaissance revenge tragedies, as this study will illustrate,
are often highly metatheatrical in that playwrights borrowed
visual and verbal images from earlier plays to enhance a
theatrical artifice. At a time when originality was not particu-

13
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

larly valued, some recall of motifs in plays representing revenge

is to be expected. Presumably, the spectators’ pleasure in
watching such plays was bound up with the recognition of
redeployed devices they had witnessed in other works. In our
own time, of all revenge plays, Hamlet has acquired a cultural
centrality; but the textual evidence suggests this was true also in
the early seventeenth century. In The Atheist’s Tragedy, for
example, Charlemont’s meditations in the graveyard would
surely have recalled Hamlet’s evocative words as he gazes at the
skull of Yorick, his father’s jester, while the gravediggers are
preparing the grave of Ophelia. The actual and the assumed
madness in Chettle’s Hoffman also betrays the influence of
Hamlet. The Spanish Tragedy exerted its influence for decades on
subsequent revenge plays, notably in depicting revenge as
taking place under cover of a court entertainment or masque.
Several revengers carry with them physical emblems, reminders
of loss and duty: Hamlet writes down in his ‘tables’ the
injunction of the ghost to kill Claudius; Vindici carries the skull
of his dead lover Gloriana, and Hieronimo clasps the napkin
stained with the blood of his son Horatio.
The formal features outlined above bring a certain coherence
to a group of plays recognized as belonging to the tradition of
revenge tragedy. From the early twentieth century it has been a
critical practice to think of Renaissance plays with a revenge
theme, modelled on Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and displaying a
debt to Seneca, as having a distinct generic identity.13 In
Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy Fredson Bowers examined the
genealogy of revenge tragedy beginning with Kyd. 14 In
Bowers’s account the genre developed by incorporating Germa-
nic and later Italian influences manifest in Jacobean and
Caroline plays. A similar approach is reflected in a more recent
study by Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallet, The Revenger’s Madness,
in which it is supposed that there is a certain configuration of
formal elements – notably the appearance of a ghost and the
madness, real or feigned, of the avenger – which defines and
delimits the approach.15 In her edition Four Revenge Tragedies
Katherine Eisaman Maus finds more socio-political than
dramatic congruence between plays as diverse as The Revenger’s
Tragedy and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (the latter, with The
Atheist’s Tragedy, classified as an anti-revenge play). Maus

14
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

acknowledges conventions and characteristics in common,

however idiosyncratically they are displayed, and observes that
a play of revenge can be better understood if it can be shown
how it deviates from the norms of its genre.16 What remains
problematic is defining the norms of the genre other than in
very general terms. Katherine Maus singles out the revenger’s
dilemma and his demands for justice in a politically corrupt
world, rather than any shared dramatic or theatrical qualities.
But, again, amongst the plays discussed in this study there is
much variation in the motivations and actions of individual
revengers and a demand for justice is not always paramount.
Formal elements can only roughly define a generic category:
ghosts appear and characters go mad in plays other than
revenge plays. Renaissance revenge plays, unlike classical
antecedents constructed entirely upon an archetypal pattern
of revenge orchestrated by the gods, are discursive in their
action and despite some shared features each has its own
peculiar accent in style and tone as well as its individual take on
revenge. Few plays then can be said to concentrate entirely on,
or expose, a fixed drive to revenge; typically, revenge plots
become complicated by court politics and intrigue, and by love
and sexual desire as well as counter-plots against the revenger.
The need to revenge can be induced by a gross miscarriage of
justice, but, equally, it is represented as a crime of passionate
retaliation for an offence or slight and as such elicits quite
different audience responses. Indeed, in later revenge plays
honour, variously defined and sometimes quite cynically
constructed, displaces justice as motivation. It is doubtful
whether Renaissance dramatists were aware that they were
consciously employing conventions of a defined tragic subgenre;
few Renaissance plays in their titles or title pages, in which it was
common practice to offer an elaborately descriptive subtitle, call
attention to the revenge theme or to the role of the protagonist as
revenger. Genres are not passively inherited, but made and re-
made every time a new play is written and performed. Verbal or
structural evocation of one revenge play does not necessarily
indicate a consciousness of genre and tradition; it can also denote
opportunistic borrowing. Indeed, the deployment of common
motifs often highlights aesthetic difference rather than depen-
dence.

15
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

The term ‘revenge tragedy’, with its implication of a specific

subgenre of tragedy, is then in the main resisted in this study, as
is the notion that The Spanish Tragedy can be regarded as a
template for subsequent plays. As I have argued, the nature of
revenge as it defines dramatic action is per se problematic. In The
Duchess of Malfi, for example, there is a counterpointing of
psychotic Ferdinand’s perverted revenge against his widow sister,
‘guilty’ only in so far as she disobeys him in remarrying, with that
of the intelligencer and murderer Bosola, whose conscience is
awakened, and who caps his many roles by assuming that of the
Duchess’s revenger. Revenge was used to signify cultural
‘otherness’. Marston in Antonio’s Revenge, Middleton in The
Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women and Webster in The
White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi exploited and heightened a
perception of the Italian city states, with their counter-reforma-
tion ideologies, as locations of corruption, feud and blood
revenge. When revenge can be associated with resentment as
in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge and Massinger’s Duke of Milan, with
a primitive and anarchic justice as in Titus Andronicus and The
Spanish Tragedy, with providential justice as in The Atheist’s
Tragedy and with masculinity as in The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois,
the problems of establishing the genre become apparent.
With revenge so evident a theme in Renaissance drama, it is
legitimate to ask why particular plays have been selected for
discussion. The chapters will focus on plays in which revenge
figures either as a motive of dramatic action, usually leading to
the death of the protagonist, or as the matrix for more discursive
dramatic action. Rather than group plays entirely in chronolo-
gical order, the choice of texts discussed in individual chapters
has largely been determined by shared dramatic concerns or by
what revenge signifies in terms of justice, honour, divine
vengeance, gender and national identity. It is, of course,
necessary to have some sense of the dramatic chronology of
revenge tragedies, if only to be aware of the antecedents of a
specific play. But there is no simple trajectory of revenge
tragedy to suggest that as it developed self-consciously, the form
became, morally and aesthetically, outworn and decadent. There
were parodies of revenge by Marston and Middleton in the early
seventeenth century, implying a theatrical self-awareness, yet,
years after such serio-comic representation, revenge was again

16
 INTRODUCTION: REVENGE AND REVENGE TRAGEDY

presented with an ethical seriousness and psychological

intensity. Some plays we will examine might seem only
coincidentally revenge plays. While noting certain formal
characteristics and evident debts and intertexts, the aim of this
study will be, however, to consider each play on its own terms,
examining both the configuration of revenge and the distinctive
theatrical idiom.
Far from belonging to a genre that rehearses convention,
revenge plays show themselves to be unpredictable in their ways
of projecting ethical dilemma and unstable in their recourse to
farce, satire, parody and melodrama. Bacon’s axiom that revenge
is a kind of wild justice is an oxymoron in so far as it implies the
reparation of wrong through unruly and violent acts. ‘Wild’ also
encapsulates something of the aesthetic experience of plays of
revenge. Revengers, of course, become wild – distracted,
demented, out of their wits, passionately vehement or impet-
uous. Similarly, the action itself is not easily controlled, as wild
and spectacular responses bring us close to melodrama and
laughter becomes a defence against the bleak experience of loss
and violence. The wild justice we see enacted in these plays is a
response to something we could, by analogy, describe as wild
injustice. Its exponents, with their egotistical contempt for the
lives of others, inhabit a menacing space of infantile wilfulness
informed by adult urges. Theirs is a strange world, close to our
worst fears and hidden desires, and this explains the sense of
horror and fascination these plays continue to exert: a horror
which is, of course, held in check by the various transformations
effected by the illusion of theatre.

17
 1

Revenge and Justice:

Elizabethan Revenge Tragedies

The immense popularity of the first surviving revenge play of

the newly established commercial theatre, Thomas Kyd's The
Spanish Tragedy, spawned a dramatic preoccupation with the
theme for several decades. Kyd, like Shakespeare, was not
university educated, but the classical training he received at the
Merchant Taylors' School in London is well demonstrated in the
language, rhetorical style and imagery of The Spanish Tragedy.
The financially precarious profession of playwright was one of
the options available to a man with literary aspirations. Kyd's
career followed a very different path from that of Shakespeare ±
he died in penury ± but he made his mark as a pioneering
dramatist for the newly established commercial theatre.1 Indeed
one critic has gone as far as to identify Kyd alongside
Christopher Marlowe with the creation of Elizabethan tragedy.2
The intricate plotting, characterization and intuition of
theatrical effect make Kyd's play highly original, although, like
other popular revenge plays, it has antecedents in the academic
drama, specifically the dramatic works of Seneca (c.4 BC±AD 65)
and neo-Senecan drama. The plays of Seneca had been
translated into English by Jasper Heywood, John Neville and
John Studley in the mid sixteenth century and all the tragedies
were published by Thomas Newton in 1581.3 Seneca is often
perceived solely in terms of the atrocious crimes which his plays
relate and in this context Thyestes is most often cited as a prime
example of a play dominated by the outrageous acts of a
bloodthirsty revenger. In the play, Atreus, brother of Thyestes, is
caught up in a cycle of revenge incited by Tantalus, his uncle,

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 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

whose tormented ghost summoned from the underworld

appears at the beginning of the play, asking `What ill am I
appointed for?' In response to Thyestes's rape of his wife,
Atreus plots to afflict him `with greater pain'. A servant
comments incredulously on Atreus's lack of pity in the final
act of vengeance, the murder of his brother's children: after the
ritual of their murder, described in piteous detail by the Chorus,
their limbs are served up as a feast to their father. In the English
translation by Jasper Heywood (1561) an additional soliloquy
was composed in which Thyestes appeals to the gods to avenge
this atrocity.4 Thus revenge continues in perpetuity.
In considering the horrific excesses of Senecan drama, it
should be remembered that in the Renaissance Seneca was also
admired for his loftiness of style, sententiousness and moral
seriousness. Elizabeth I had translated from Seneca's plays and
the English translation by Jasper Heywood of Troas was
dedicated to her. Thomas Newton, in his admiring preface to
Tenne Tragedies, warned against a literal reading of the plays
without due attention to style and dramatic context:
And whereas it is by some squeamish Areopagites surmised, that the
reading of the tragedies, being interlarded with many phrases and
sentences literally tending (at the first sight) sometime to the praise
of ambition, sometime to the maintenance of cruelty, now and then
to the approbation of incontinency, and here and there to the
ratification of tyranny, can not be digested without great danger of
infection: to omit all other reasons, if it might please them with no
forestalled judgement to mark and consider the circumstances, why,
where, and by what manner of persons such sentences are
pronounced . . . For it may not be thought and deemed the direct
meaning of Seneca himself, whose whole writings (penned with a
peerless sublimity and loftiness of style) are so far from countenan-
cing vice that I doubt whether there be any amongst all the
catalogue of heathen writers that with more gravity of philosophical
sentences, more weightiness of sappy words, or greater authority of
sound matter beateth down sin, loose life, dissolute dealing, and
unbridled sensuality: or that more sensibly, pithily, and bitingly
layeth down the guerdon of filthy lust, cloaked dissimulation and
odious treachery: which is the drift whereunto he leaveth the whole
issue of each one of his tragedies.
Seneca's preoccupation with power and its corruption was only
one aspect of his appeal to English Renaissance playwrights. His

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 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

style was much admired and emulated; Kyd, Shakespeare and

Marston draw on Seneca, either through direct citation, or
through the use of set descriptive passages, the grieving lament
and stichomythia. Formally, popular playwrights revealed an
indebtedness to Seneca in their depictions of tormented or
vindictive ghosts from the underworld, or through an appeal to
mythic structures of relentless revenge.5 We can see how the
appeal to Seneca and the adaptation of Senecan material was a
means of validating vernacular drama. Recourse to Seneca gave
the new, popular and commercial Elizabethan theatre cultural
capital.
Seneca's plays were read or performed under private
auspices; that is, at court, at the inns of court and at the
universities. Oedipus and Medea were read ± or declaimed ± in
Latin and were possibly even treated to some kind of restricted
performance in Cambridge colleges in the decades before
Newton's edition.6 Plays were also written at least partially in
imitation of Seneca. Amongst the various entertainments,
intellectual disquisitions and debates scheduled for Elizabeth
I's visit to Oxford in 1564, there was a performance in the hall of
Christ Church of a Latin play Progne, now lost.7 The play was
evidently a representation of the violent story told in the sixth
book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, later to be evoked by Shakespeare
in Titus Andronicus, in which Procne wrought revenge on her
husband Tereus for his rape of her sister, Philomel. One of the
students, Bereblock, described the play and his response to it:
It is wonderful how she [Procne] longed to seek vengeance for the
blood of her sister. She goes about therefore to avenge wrongs with
wrongs, and injuries with injuries; nor is it all reverent to add crimes
to crimes already committed . . . And the play was a notable
portrayal of mankind in its evil deeds, and was for the spectators, as
it were, a clear moral of all those who indulge too much either in
love or in wrath, each of which even if they come to fairly good men
nevertheless inflame them with too strong desire, and make them far
fiercer and more ungovernable, and very different in voice,
countenance, spirit, in word and deed, from moderation and self-
control.8
What is interesting about this response is the moralistic tone,
very much in keeping with the condemnations of anger and
retaliation expressed in the essays of Seneca, Bacon and

20
 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

Montaigne. Extreme emotions lead only to self-destruction.

When revenge is transposed to the public theatres, however, it
becomes more histrionic in its representation and, as dramatists
recognized the potential in subverting the clear moralistic tone
of earlier academic drama, the plight of the revenger came to
elicit a more complex response.
Revenge was also a theme of Senecan academic plays, such as
Gorboduc, performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1570 by the
Gentlemen of the Inner Temple, and The Misfortunes of Arthur
(1588), also performed at court. In the former play, drawing on
the myth of Britain rather than classical mythology, the authors
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton depict Gorboduc divid-
ing his kingdom between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex.
Counsellors advise against such a policy, `for with one land, one
single rule is best' and, predictably, political anarchy follows.
Ferrex, angry that his father, in dividing the kingdom, has
ignored his alleged rights as elder son, vows to avenge the
offence, but he is fatally pre-empted in his action: a messenger ±
following classical precedent in reporting violent acts ± recounts
the murder of Ferrex by Porrex, who now enters into sole
possession of the realm. Gorboduc, in an appeal which will be
reiterated time and again on the Elizabethan stage, calls on
heaven for retributive justice and, amplifying his distress,
invokes his own destruction: `O Heavens, send down the
flames of your revenge/ Destroy, I say, with flash of wreackful
fire/ The traitor son, and then the wretched sire' (III. ii. 946±8).
But such appeals are rhetorical only, as revenge is effected not
by divine but by human agency. Videna, mother of Ferrex and
Porrex, laments the death of Ferrex and, without any of the
deliberation which will characterize later revenge plays, vows
revenge on her son Porrex: `To thine own flesh, and traitor to
thyself,/ The gods on thee in Hell shall wreak their wrath/ And
here in earth this hand shall take revenge' (IV. i. 1004±6). Porrex
cannot hope to escape `just revenge' and his murder at the
hands of his mother is reported by Marcella, attendant to
Videna. Cruelty of brother towards brother is now transmuted
to that of mother against child in Marcella's lament: `Will ever
wight believe that such hard heart/ Could rest within the cruel
mother's breast/ With her own hand to slay her only son' (IV. ii.
1234±6). Gorboduc represents what Bacon would have judged

21
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

public revenge in the sense that there is no secret plotting or

devising of elaborate strategies; one action inexorably follows
another. The play also presents the apparent complicity of
divine and human agencies as Marcella bemoans the `hard cruel
heart' that could `lend the hateful destiny that hand'. Gorboduc,
admired by a neo-classicist such as Sir Philip Sidney for its tragic
decorum and adherence to classical form, is a mythic antecedent
for Shakespeare's more indeterminate King Lear. Any political
message in Shakespeare's play remains open and opaque; not
so in Gorboduc, which carries the clear political moral that lack of
strength and unity at the centre of power will lead only to chaos
in the realm, while the revenge theme carries an equally
exemplary moral in its articulation of vengeance as unnatural,
destructive and self-perpetuating.

THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

Twenty-nine performances of The Spanish Tragedy are recorded

between 1592 and 1597: an impressive number exceeded only by
two other plays ± Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta and a lost
play, The Wise Man of West Chester ± according to extant records.9
The continuing appeal of The Spanish Tragedy is recorded in the
Induction to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), where the
scrivener reads a mock agreement, drawn up between the
playwright and the audience: a pretext for Jonson to project an
image of his ideal audience and of a critically discerning
reception of his play. Consistency and constancy of judgement
are to be commended: `He that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus
are the best plays yet, shall pass unexpected at, here, as a man
whose judgement shows it is constant, and hath stood still,
these five and twenty, or thirty years'. The Spanish Tragedy,
known here by the name of its protagonist Jeronimo or
Hieronimo, is coupled with another, near contemporaneous,
revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Both are offered as examples
of plays which have, despite competing dramatic aesthetics,
retained their popularity and, in rather patronizing vein, the
scrivener concludes that, while such taste in drama betokens a
certain ignorance, `it is a virtuous and staid ignorance'. If
theatrical anecdotes can be credited, the popularity of The

22
 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

Spanish Tragedy extended well beyond the composition of

Bartholomew Fair and into the Caroline period. Richard
Braithwait, in his book on female conduct, The English Gentle-
woman, refers disapprovingly to women who make `pleasure
their vocation' and cites as example an occasion when a dying
woman cried out vehemently for `Hieronimo'.10 That one of the
earliest plays of the Elizabethan stage is recalled in a work which
belongs to an era characterized by more elitist theatre, attests to
the sustained theatrical impact of the play. The remarkable
influence of The Spanish Tragedy is further borne out by its
evocation in early revenge plays, as they notably trade on its
success by displaying a similar concern with visual effects,
detailed plotting, the portrayal of overwhelming emotion and
an intense sense of injustice on the part of the protagonist.
Amongst other venues, the play was performed at the Rose
playhouse owned by Philip Henslowe, the first of the theatres
erected on the Bankside, which also doubled as a venue for bear
and bull baiting. It is from Henslowe's records of performances
and payments, his so called `Diary', that we learn of the
considerable number of revivals of the play.11 The Rose
playhouse was built in 1587 and, although we cannot say that
the play was written with this venue specifically in mind, Kyd
seems to have well understood the representational demands of
the new theatrical space available to him; in particular, the art of
constructing a play to be presented on the large, exposed stage
of the amphitheatre (the Rose stage was wide, but shallow). The
Spanish Tragedy is expressively theatrical in its dramatic
exploitation of sensational spectacle and of the rhetorically
patterned speech of lamentation and distraction. Departing
from classical precedents, Kyd relies hardly at all on the indirect
narration of his story by a Chorus or by messengers. The Chorus
of The Spanish Tragedy, unseen spectators of action which has
been predetermined, performs quite a different function. In the
play proper, Kyd combines a complex plot of intrigue and,
through Hieronimo's soliloquies, some sense of interiority
which gives his drama a new psychological dimension and
credibility.
As with subsequent revenge plays, and in contrast to the
single narrative of most classical revenge tragedies, The Spanish
Tragedy represents revenge and counter-revenge plots. The play

23
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

opens with the ghost of the Spanish knight Don Andrea, who
informs us of his death in battle with the Portuguese, of his love
for Bel-imperia, niece to the King of Spain, and, finally, his quest
for revenge in the underworld. Andrea's desire for vengeance
frames the play, but the dramatic focus shifts away from it to the
alliance of Lorenzo, brother to Bel-imperia, and Balthazar, son of
the Viceroy of Portugal, and their malicious machinations in
murdering Horatio, friend to Andrea and son of Hieronimo.
Knight Marshal of Spain. Balthazar and Lorenzo construe their
murder of Horatio as revenge for Horatio's wooing of Bel-
imperia. It is Bel-imperia, who for ambivalent motives initiates
the love affair; but Lorenzo and Balthazar insist on seeing
Horatio as challenging the play's rigid social hierarchy in his
declarations of love, and they cruelly pun on his seeming
aspiration as they hang up his body: `Although his life were still
ambitious, proud,/ Yet is he at the highest now he is dead' (II. iv.
59±60). Balthazar's readiness to act as an accomplice to the more
sinister Lorenzo is explained by resentment and frustration
which he glosses as revenge. Horatio's death prompts Hier-
onimo's vengeance, which, far from the dispassionate contri-
vance of Lorenzo and Balthazar, produces outraged suffering
and moments of insanity. Further complications ensue with
Lorenzo's intrigue to ensure that none of his accomplices in the
murder of Horatio survive to betray him, and thus he engineers
the deaths of Serberine and Pedringano. Lorenzo's double-
dealing is in a sense replicated by Hieronimo's elaborate
plotting of revenge during the performance of Soliman and
Perseda, but in Hieronimo's case the double-dealing is more
complex: those who profess themselves innocent ± the actual
murderers ± play the murdered, unwittingly and in earnest.
The play encompasses pagan and Christian rhetoric for and
against revenge. In a similar cultural cross-current, it juxtaposes,
in the figures of the Chorus, the spirit of Revenge and the ghost
of Andrea, intimates in the pagan underworld, with characters
inhabiting Catholic Renaissance courts of Spain and Portugal.
There might seem to be some conflict between the two dramatic
constructs. In his soliloquy in Act 3, Hieronimo, presented as an
apparent agent of free will, agonizes over whether to revenge or
leave vengeance to God. Yet, from the opening chorus when
Andrea tells us that Proserpine has granted him Revenge as his

24
 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

companion, we know that Revenge is scripting the tragedy.

Revenge is directed and controlled by the powers of the
underworld much as the Furies in classical plays determine
retribution, and this mythic necessity is commensurate with
Hieronimo's inner compulsion to revenge. Although in the
Choruses at the end of each act Andrea expresses impatience at
the leisurely way Revenge seems to be going about his purpose,
Revenge's words to Andrea leave us in no doubt of the outcome.
At the close of Act 2, Andrea is incredulous: not only has his own
killing in battle not been acquitted, but his friend Horatio has
now been murdered by Lorenzo and Balthazar. In a memorable
image, Revenge intimates that events will take their prescribed
course:
ANDREA. Broughtst thou me hither to increase my pain?
I looked that Balthazar should have been slain,
But `tis my friend Horatio that is slain . . .
REVENGE. Thou talkest of harvest when the corn is green.
(II. v. 1±6)

At the end of the third act, when Andrea is yet again

importuning Revenge to awaken, Revenge reminds him that
the characters are unconsciously fulfilling the destiny he has
dictated: `Behold, Andrea, for an instance how/ Revenge hath
slept, and then imagine thou/ What `tis to be subject to destiny.'
Events in the Spanish court are not then simply historicized
through the projection of the Spanish/Portuguese conflict; we
are also encouraged to share the Chorus's perspective of an
endless cycle of crime and retribution.
Being of the action but not in it, the Chorus occupies an
ambiguous space that is open to definition in the performance of
The Spanish Tragedy. Possibly in a gallery on high or standing at
the side of the stage, even occasionally intermingling with the
characters, Revenge is a constant reminder of an infernal
presence and of the illusory nature of Hieronimo's apparent
free will. Modern productions have made effective use of these
two extra-dramatic characters, interweaving them into the stage
action, visible ± as is their purpose ± only to the audience. There
is an element not only of tension but of comedy between the
impatient, incredulous Andrea and the laconic, deliberate
Revenge who sleeps out part of the play's action. In the

25
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

production staged in the small Cottesloe auditorium of the Royal

National Theatre in 1982,12 Revenge was there to prompt
Hieronimo (Fig. 1). Clad in black leathers, suggesting both an
executioner and an exhausted stage hand, and smoking
cheroots, Revenge handed out the props of Bel-Imperia's letter
and Hieronimo's dagger, while Don Andrea stood aghast at the
tardiness of his work. Kyd presents what we might now see as a
Brechtian effect in that the audience is distanced from the
action; the play is a pageant working towards a foreseeable
conclusion. The extremities of Hieronimo's passion also con-
tribute towards this effect as his rhetorical expression makes us
aware of the actor playing the part and thus our response shifts
from empathy to understanding.
In Renaissance drama, relationships between literary texts are
endemic as dramatists drew eclectically from a wide range of
materials. In The Spanish Tragedy Kyd is clearly indebted to the
plays of Seneca, not only ± as in Thyestes, Trojan Women,
Agamemnon and Hercules Furens ± for his revenge theme, but
also for the play's rhetorical style. Hieronimo's laments for the
death of Horatio recall the sorrowing Hecuba's laments in Trojan
Women for the downfall of Troy and the murder of her husband
Priam. The passages descriptive of the underworld in the
Chorus speeches of Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy are
reminiscent of Theseus's account to Amphitryon of the inexor-
able torments of the underworld in Hercules Furens. In contrast
to the more amplified speeches of lament and evocative
description, Seneca also employs stichomythia, a quick-fire
dialogue of repartee and rejoinder. Kyd lacks the occasion for
this, but he would seem to like the effect, since he does
something similar in the wooing of Horatio by Bel-imperia,
during which the eavesdropping Balthazar and Lorenzo
interject their own twisted interpretations. The latter, of course,
go unheard and receive no reply, making their rejoinders asides;
nevertheless the dialogue and interjections have the antagonist
force typical of stichomythia.
In producing the first revenge tragedy of the popular theatre
Kyd's debts were not only literary ones. The Spanish Tragedy has
evident links with other cultural practices.13 Both the place of
execution and the platform where plays were performed were,
in the early modern period, known as a scaffold. In The Spanish

26
Figure 1. Peter Needham as Revenge and Michael Bryant as
Hieronimo in the 1982 Royal National Theatre production of Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy, directed by Michael Bogdanov. With the
permission of the photographer Laurence Burns.

27
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

Tragedy the link between stage and scaffold is particularly

apparent as Kyd constructs dramatic entertainment for the
public theatre from the images of public execution. We could say
that The Spanish Tragedy imaginatively represents part of public
life where atrocity was acceptable. Hieronimo discovers the body
of his son Horatio hanging in the bower where, like a common
criminal, he has been strung up following the murder plot
contrived by Lorenzo and Balthazar. That this image was central
to the play's theatrical iconography is suggested by the woodcut
on the title page of an edition of the play published in 1615
depicting the hanging corpse of Horatio in the bower (see
frontispiece). The woodcut represents the figures of Hieronimo,
bearing a sword and torch (to convey night on the undarkened
stage), with the caption `Alas it is my son Horatio'; Bel-imperia
appealing to Hieronimo in the caption `Murder, help Hieroni-
mo'; and a masked Lorenzo holding Bel-imperia, with the
words `Stop her mouth'. The dramatic configuration relates to
Act 2, scene 4, and compresses stage action: Hieronimo is not, of
course, present at the murder of his son, nor are Bel-imperia and
Lorenzo present at Hieronimo's discovery. Following the murder
of Horatio, Bel-imperia is forcibly removed from the scene,
leaving the stage ready for the shocking revelation to the father
of the dead son. The image, on the other hand, brings together
all the actors in the plots of murder and of retribution.
The scene of execution is re-enacted ± this time in a scene of
officially sanctioned justice ± when Pedringano is executed for
his murder of Serberine (following instructions from Lorenzo).
The scene incorporates black humour as Pedringano on the
scaffold persists in his belief that Lorenzo will intervene for his
reprieve, jesting with the hangman and prompting his
comment, `Thou art even the merriest piece of man's flesh that
e`er groaned at my office door' (III. vi. 80±81). In practice,
gallows humour was not uncommon; prisoners would jest with
the hangman or pun on their fate. But the most astonishing
deployment of the scaffold image comes in the catastrophe, as
Hieronimo, after wreaking destruction on the House of Castile,
reveals both that the tragedy that they have witnessed is no
mere spectacle and the part he has played:
No, princes, know I am Hieronimo,
The hopeless father of a hapless son,

28
 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

Whose tongue is tuned to tell his latest tale. . .

Behold the reason urging me to do this!
(IV. iv. 82±7).

Here, the stage direction reads `Shows his dead son', conveying
the effect of Hieronimo drawing back a curtain which he had
fastened up at the beginning of the previous scene, to expose
the body of Horatio. Corpses of victim and murderer are
simultaneously displayed; the sight of the bodies of Horatio and
Lorenzo represents restored symmetry that is reinforced in
Hieronimo's rhetorically patterned words.
It is possible to argue that Kyd panders to an audience's
voyeuristic curiosity in the repeated use of the hanging,
mutilated corpse in a manner reminiscent of the public
executions at which they might equally be spectators. In Hamlet,
a later revenge play that owes much to ± but drastically departs
from ±The Spanish Tragedy, the corpses, until the catastrophe, lie
hidden, undisclosed. Hamlet 's father insists that what he
undergoes in purgatory is too hideous to speak of. Kyd, on
the other hand, presents death as grisly spectacle. The final
Chorus, in projecting the fates of Lorenzo, Balthazar, Pedringa-
no and Serberine, holds out the prospect of eternal torment as
revenge is perpetuated ad infinitum. Death may appear to end
their misery, but, concludes Revenge, `I'll there begin their
endless tragedy.' His words evoke the public execution where
the purpose was to inflict torture and torment that would be
replicated after death in the Hell of the damned. If there is an
element of voyeurism, however, it is integrated into the drama
as spectacle is consistently reinforced by the play's verbal effects.
Visual and verbal images effectively complement each other
throughout the play. Hieronimo crazily imagines a journey to
the underworld, `to th'Elysian plains', where he will recover his
murdered son Horatio and his distraught determination to `rip
the bowels of the earth' is accompanied by the equally hysterical
gesture of hacking at the stage with his dagger. By juxtaposing
visual and verbal in this way there is an imaginative exploration
of the nature of the violence to which Hieronimo is exposed and
which he inwardly experiences.
Like Hamlet, Hieronimo's suffering leads him to contemplate
suicide. It is characteristic of Kyd's style that, unlike Hamlet,
Hieronimo's dilemma is externalized as he delivers his soliloquy

29
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

on suicide with emblematic stage props. He enters (III. xii)

carrying a poniard and rope and considers that his death would
gain him entry to the underworld, where access to its monarch,
Pluto, might give him the justice he has been denied on earth.
But he draws back ± `Who will revenge Horatio's murder then?'
± and in a symbolic gesture flings away the dagger and halter. A
similar emblematic use of stage properties to articulate the
protagonist's state of mind is evident in the following scene (III.
xiii) when Hieronimo enters with a book in his hand. From the
ensuing soliloquy it is not clear what the book is ± a play (or the
plays) of Seneca or the Bible, as he refers to both ± and, true to
the congruence in the play of pagan and Christian, he conflates
classical stoicism and Biblical teaching in deliberating on his
course of action. Should he leave vengeance to heaven which
will not `suffer murder unrepaid', and besides, `Mortal men may
not appoint their time'? Or, alluding to Seneca's play Agamem-
non, should he `strike, and strike home where wrong is offered
thee'? In contrast with Hamlet's soliloquies, where so much
remains unresolved and where any sense of resolution is
negated by subsequent meditation, Hieronimo does resolve his
dilemma and decides on a course of action:
And, to conclude, I will revenge his death!
But how? Not as the vulgar wits of men,
With open, but inevitable ills,
As by a secret, yet a certain mean,
Which under kindship will be cloaked best.
(III. xiii. 20±24)

Thus, indecision is temporary and Hieronimo embarks on a

cunning strategy of revenge that will involve lulling his enemies
into a false sense of security. In the next soliloquy, revenge ±
now `sweet revenge' ± is projected unequivocally as the only
possible course of action. He reveals little of his plan, however,
and the audience are kept guessing as to his strategy, so that it
could be, as Isabella `believes', that he has none at all.
As a tragic subject Hieronimo is characterized first by grief,
then by his sense of inordinate injustice and mental suffering
which lead to moments of madness. At the beginning of the play
Hieronimo is clearly esteemed by the king, who is anxious that
he be awarded the ransom money due to Horatio for his capture

30
 ELIZABETHAN REVENGE TRAGEDIES

of Balthazar. Yet the king later accepts without question the

words of his nephew Lorenzo, who dismisses Hieronimo as `in a
manner lunatic'; in the inflexible class structure of the play the
word of royalty is taken before that of a loyal servant. In the
early stages of the play his identity is indeed that of a dedicated
servant to the crown. He sits in judgement on Pedringano for his
murder of Serberine; he is faithful to the idea of full retribution
and condemns Pedringano to death as a common criminal, to be
hung on the scaffold. This brings a further reflection of
Horatio's ignominious death and when Hieronimo observes
`This makes me to remember thee my son', his words carry more
weight than he knows. The hanging corpse painfully reminds
him of Horatio's similar fate, yet he is ignorant of the part
Pedringano has played in Horatio's murder. His role as Knight
Marshall is indeed ironic: he is an arbiter of justice, but for him
justice is denied. He appeals to the highest authority, the king,
for retribution for Horatio's murder; but his passionate out-
pourings of loss and his manic gestures make it easy for Lorenzo
to convince the king and court that, in coveting the ransom
promised to Horatio, Hieronimo has become mad. His distracted
pleas go unheeded amidst the formal court business and when
justice through royal channels is denied him, Hieronimo sees
private revenge as the only alternative. If he cannot find legal
redress, he must become the executioner himself.
It could be argued that when Hieronimo embarks on revenge,
which encompasses the innocent as well as the guilty, this marks
a transition from heroic status to that of villain, but this seems
rather too simplistic. Hieronimo's actions are grounded in moral
deliberation; his compulsive responses are entirely credible,
emanating first from grief and then from a sense of injustice. His
soliloquy when he discovers his murdered son captures his
distracted passions. As the elaborate conceits convey ± eyes are
`fountains fraught with tears' ± he is overwhelmed by sorrow. In
the final scene, when the audience views Horatio's corpse,
Hieronimo's speech carries the weight of emotion, expressive of
unbearable loss and an aching need for retribution:
See here my show, look on this spectacle!
Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end;
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain;
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost;

31
 REVENGE TRAGEDIES OF THE RENAISSANCE

Here lay my bliss, and here my bliss bereft;

But hope, heart, treasure, joy, and bliss,
All fled, failed, died, yea, all decayed with this.
From forth these wounds came breath that gave me life;
They murdered me that made these fatal marks.
The cause was love, whence grew this mortal hate.
(IV. iv. 88±97)

Despite the verbal artifice in the use of alliteration and

repetition, the emotion breaks through the formal patterning:
the lines effectively convey the depths of suffering and
encapsulate the extremities of love and hate which compel
revenge. Hieronimo's heightened feelings are communicated in
.

the distortion of his logical patterns of thought. Horatio's death

is metaphorically the death of his father. The self-observation
`They murdered me that made these fatal marks' should
rationally precede the impulse to revenge which has energized
Hieronimo: `From forth these wounds came breath that gave me
life.' The point is simply made: love for Horatio breeds hatred
for his killers.
Horatio's body is a constant reminder to his father of inner
trauma, as well as a powerful symbol of murder and injustice. In
The Spanish Tragedy physical objects are powerful mementoes
and, like places, trigger memory of what has been lost. The
napkin given to Horatio by Bel-imperia, who had received it
from Andrea, serves this function. Hieronimo claims the napkin
and with it mops up his son's blood on discovering the body in
his bower. Subsequently, Isabella, before killing herself, razes
the bower to the ground in an attempt to destroy the memory of
± and avenge herself upon ± the place where her son was
murdered (IV. ii). The handkerchief, symbolic of love and death,
is obsessively retained and produced at key moments in the
drama. One particular episode illustrates the way Kyd uses his
stage properties so effectively. In the midst of his soliloquy
when he is meditating on the rights and wrongs of revenge,
Hieronimo breaks off, hearing a noise. He is approached by
three citizens and an old man. The citizens ask Hieronimo, in
his position as Knight Marshal, to intervene on their behalf
before the king. Hieronimo questions each of them and asks of
the Old Man what is the cause of his supplication (Fig. 2). In
what appears as a bizarre coincidence, one which is typical of

32
33
Figure 2. Daniel Thorndike as Balzuto and Michael Bryant as Hieronimo in the 1982 Royal National
Theatre production of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, directed by Michael Bogdanov. With the
permission of the photographer Laurence Burns.
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